In The New Yorker, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes on Stephen Gill's The Pillar.
What Gill did was erect a pillar a few hundred metres from the house in which he lives, outside the village of Glemmingebro, in the area of southern Sweden called Österlen. Next to that pillar, he erected another, with a camera on it. The camera was equipped with a motion sensor, and the idea was that birds would settle on one pillar and be photographed automatically by the camera on the other. “I decided to try to pull the birds from the sky,” he said.
And that was what happened. All kinds of birds, from the smallest sparrow to the biggest eagle, were drawn to the pillar. Not only were they drawn down from the sky but the sky was drawn out of them: the birds in Gill’s images are so physical, so of the body, so material as to make plain to us how even their flight belongs to the ground. These birds came from the earth, there is nothing ethereal about them. The order to which they belong is prehistoric, predating our own by millions of years, and, although they have developed optimized beaks, claws, eyes, wings, they still struggle against matter every single day, the way they’ve always done—tossed about by the wind, compelled from their perches, dipping their wings to the water on hot summer days. That they are never perfect, that they are forever improvising, that no fixed form exists in their lives, are things I have never thought of as applying to birds until I saw these photographs.
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